How Does Elemental Shaman Look in WoW: Forever?

Elemental Shamans have such a unique role in any group composition that it makes sense that their players are incredibly passionate. WoW: Forever is making some changes to Elemental, so our class expert Lucenia has taken a deep dive into everything you need to know about Elemental in the latest iteration of Classic WoW.

The Story of Elemental in Classic

As masters of Lightning and Fire, Elemental Shamans overwhelm our foes with a barrage of fast, high-volume spells like Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst, with bursts of damage from talents like Lightning Overload and Elemental Mastery, and the oh-so satisfying sound of Clearcasting procs. The spec fantasy appeals to many players, yet it's historically struggled with being difficult to level and scaling poorly in raids.

In Classic 2019, Elemental was one of a group of so-called "Meme Specs" - hybrid specs that performed poorly in raids, lacked unique utility to make them valuable, and often required excessive Mana management compared to other specs. We actually performed relatively well early on, but by the last 2 weeks of Classic 2019, we were among the least played specs, alongside Balance, Retribution, and Enhancement, drawing in just 0.4% of the overall DPS population in Naxxramas.

In The Burning Crusade: Classic, new utility Totems like Totem of Wrath and Wrath of Air Totem made us an invaluable part of raids. We once again performed well early on, yet by Sunwell joined other hybrid specs like Balance and Shadow at the bottom of the DPS meters and were replaced with Restoration Shamans in many raids.

Wrath of the Lich King gave us hope with the addition of Lava Burst and a major glow-up for Elemental Mastery. In keeping with tradition, we found a comfortable place in raids early on, but by Icecrown Citadel, we had once again fallen to the end of the pack.

We didn't fare much better in Season of Discovery, where poor synergy between our Runes and poor scaling led to Elemental struggling to keep up with other DPS for a majority of the game mode's life.

Despite its struggles, many of us who play Elemental Shaman do so because of the satisfying gameplay and incredible spec fantasy. That's why going into World of Warcraft: Forever, we had high hopes that Blizzard would learn from past mistakes and give Elemental a chance to shine with the rest.

How does Elemental look in Forever?

The short answer: rough, but easily fixed.

The Good

Fan-favorites Lightning Overload and Lava Burst return, expanding the simple Vanilla spec fantasy and rotation. Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning have had their cast times reduced by 0.5 seconds, from 3 seconds to 2.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds to 2 seconds respectively. Alongside this, Lightning Mastery has been renamed Elemental Alacrity and moved from Row 6 to Row 3 of the talent tree, and Eye of the Storm has been redesigned to work like other caster Spell Pushback talents, giving us a 70% chance to avoid Spell Pushback when hit by enemies.

Fire Nova Totem has also been replaced by Fire Nova, giving us a reliable and powerful AOE button. The addition of Mindfulness gives us access to desperately needed passive Mana regeneration while casting, and Elemental Reach has also been changed to increase the range of Flame Shock, solidifying our place as a long-range caster.

These changes allow Elemental to come online by the mid-20s, rather than at level 40 like in Vanilla and future expansions. They should be significant and make the spec easier to level, but that's unfortunately not the full picture.

The Bad

In Vanilla, Spell Power was rarely seen outside of the end game. Before level 60, most of a caster's scaling came from incremental increases to spells' base damage (the damage shown in the tooltip with 0 Spell Power) as you trained new ranks. Spell Power on gear was scarce before reaching higher-level content. This made early gearing feel less impactful for casters, so Blizzard sought to fix it in WoW: Forever. Their solution was to add Spell Power to gear all throughout the leveling process while reducing the base damage of spells to account for it.

On paper, this is a good change, but there are two major problems.

Spell Power gear is still scarce, particularly from quests. Many of us have noticed this during the beta, where casters are struggling to find Spell Power gear outside of Crafting and Dungeons. There's also a significant discrepancy between Horde and Alliance, as outlined in this Forum Post.
Even more important for Elemental, the spell base damage reduction was not applied evenly. While Mages and Priests saw small reductions, Shamans lost significantly more base damage from every one of our core damaging spells than any other class. While the difference is small in the first few levels, it quickly becomes easy to fall behind if you don't keep up with crafted and dungeon gear.

Source: Reddit: How much Spellpower each Spell Needs to match Classic

Of course, we can't just take this at face value. Every class functions differently, and Blizzard surely accounted for this with their talent and spell changes, right? Not quite.

Let's take a look at the change to Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. The changes to their cast times are well-intentioned, but have a hidden side-effect.

Spell	Vanilla	Forever
Lightning Bolt	Spell Power Scaling - 85.7% Base Cast Time - 3 seconds Talented Cast Time - 2 seconds	Spell Power Scaling - 71.4% Base Cast Time - 2.5 seconds Talented Cast Time - 2 seconds
Chain Lightning	Spell Power Scaling - 57.1% Base Cast Time - 2.5 seconds Talented Cast Time - 1.5 seconds	Spell Power Scaling - 71.4% Base Cast Time - 2 seconds Talented Cast Time - 1.5 seconds

While both spells have the same talented cast time, they also lost 20% of their Spell Power scaling. Both spells actually had unusually high scaling coefficients for their talented cast times. Elemental was the only spec in the game whose cast time reduction talent Lightning Mastery reduced the cast time by 1 second instead of the traditional 0.5 seconds. However, this difference made up for one of the weakest suites of talents in the game - dominated by talents more effective for Enhancement than for Elemental.

I believe that this change was well-intentioned, as it improves our cast times early on before we're able to pick up Elemental Alacrity. In reality, though, this is a significant nerf, especially in a version of the game leaning even more into Spell Power. On top of this, Chain Lightning is no longer worth using in our rotation until we have over 1600 total Spell Power.

The question is, did Blizzard make up for it with our talent changes? Not even close.

Let's talk about our talent changes then. Lightning Overload's tooltip is actually wrong. It's a 3-point talent with a 3/7/10% chance to proc. This is the lowest chance to proc of any implementation of the Overload mechanic that we've seen, with up to 20% in The Burning Crusade, up to 33% in Wrath of the Lich King, 16+% (increased with Mastery) in Cataclysm, and 60% in Season of Discovery. Early sims suggest that it's less than a 3% DPS increase in Single Target, making it weaker than our Row 1 talent Concussion.

Lava Burst is our other highlight. This spell has been added as our new capstone talent, replacing Elemental Mastery (our only cooldown and an iconic Elemental spell). While previous iterations had a guaranteed chance to deal a Critical Strike on targets with an active Flame Shock, this version merely increases the spell's damage by 20%. That's actually a good thing. Guaranteed Critical Strikes don't scale with more Critical Strike Chance stat, which has been one of the spec's major weaknesses for many years. Unfortunately, this spell once again suffers from poor base damage, and the 20% increased damage likely isn't enough in the long term. Once again, early sims suggest that it's less than a 2% DPS increase.

While we're at it, let's talk about Elemental Mastery for a second. We feared it was the case, but Blizzard has now outright confirmed that this iconic cooldown that existed from Vanilla to Battle for Azeroth was removed because of PVP balance. The Elemental Mastery 1-shot combo was beloved by Elemental players, but hated by our enemies. Removing the guaranteed Critical Strike aspect and toning down our burst makes sense on paper, but removing it outright, when so many other, less-bursty versions of it exist, has felt like a slap in the face to many.

While this talent was a signature mainstay of Elemental Shaman, especially in PvP, it was also a problematic talent that was holding the class back. We could not increase Elemental Shaman damage to appropriate values in PvE and keep this talent. It would have made them much too strong in PvP. The best solution was to remove this talent and give Elemental Shaman new spells and capabilities.

Mage and Shaman Class Deep Dive for World of Warcraft: Forever

Elemental Fury was also changed from a 1-point talent to a 5-point talent. This matches similar talents for other classes, but considering our already-weak talent tree, the change has not been received well. On the opposite end, Call of Thunder was changed from a 5-point talent to a 1-point talent, but now only provides 3% Critical Strike Chance instead of up to 6%. This, paired with the removal of Tidal Mastery, means that we've effectively lost 8% Critical Strike Chance from talents.

As mentioned before, the changes to Eye of the Storm and the addition of Mindfulness

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